Tendentious though he may be in the episode involving Eve, Dante is keen to defend his conviction that Adam ought to have been the first one to speak. And, despite the fact that the first sound uttered by human beings is usually a cry of pain, Adam’s first utterance could only be a cry of joy and at the same time an act of homage to his creator. Therefore, Adam’s first utterance must have been the name of God, El (DVE I, iv, 4, p. 9).
Confronted with this first linguistic act in human history, Dante must now come to grips with the issue he had proposed to deal with at the very beginning of the DVE, precisely because the plurality of languages confirmed by his experience finds its foundation and explanation in Genesis 11:1 and following. The story is a familiar one: after the Flood “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech,” but pride led mankind to vie with God and to construct a tower whose top might reach unto heaven, and the Lord, to punish their pride and prevent the construction of the tower, decides to confuse their languages.
It is true that in Genesis 10, speaking of the spreading abroad of the sons of Noah after the Flood, it is said: “By these [the sons of Japhet] were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations” (10:5), and in almost the same words the concept was repeated for the sons of Ham (10:20) and the sons of Shem (10:31). This hint of a plurality of languages existing before Babel will prove a sticking point, not only for many interpreters of the Bible but also for the Utopians of the Perfect Language (see Eco 1993, English trans. 1995b). But Dante does not consider these passages.
He is clearly convinced that before the building of the Tower of Babel there existed a perfect language, which Adam had used when talking to God, and with which he had spoken to his descendants, and that the plurality of languages had come about only after the confusio linguarum or confusion of tongues. Demonstrating a knowledge of comparative linguistics exceptional in his day, Dante shows how the various languages that sprang from the confusion multiplied in a ternary fashion, first according to a division among the various parts of the world, then, within the area that today we would define as Romance, they split up into langue d’oc, langue d’oil, and lingua del sì. The last-named, the language spoken in Italy, has become further fragmented into a plurality of dialects that sometimes, in Bologna for example, vary from one quarter of the city to another. This is because man is a mutable animal in customs, habits, and languages, over the course of both time and space.
Dante’s project for devising a more decorous and illustrious language (what he calls the volgare illustre) for the whole of Italy is to proceed to a critique of the various regional vernaculars, given that poets have always tended to keep a certain distance from the local dialect. His aim is to identify a vernacular that is illustrious (a bearer of light), cardinal (that functions as a cornerstone [cardine] for all the others), aulic or regal (worthy of its place in the palace of a national kingdom), and curial (the language of government, of the law courts, of instruction). This vernacular represents a kind of ideal rule that the best poets have come more or less close to, and by whose standards the existing vernaculars are to be judged.
The second, incomplete, portion of the DVE outlines the rules of composition for the one and only truly illustrious vernacular, the poetic language of which Dante considers himself to be the founder. But it is the first part of the treatise that interests us here.
The DVE defines the vernacular as the language children learn to use when they begin to articulate sounds, which they acquire by imitating their wet nurse, and he opposes it to a locutio secundaria, called grammar (grammatica) by the Romans. Grammar meant a language governed by rules that require extended study and of which one must acquire the habitus. This locutio secundaria is the scholastic Latin whose rules were taught in the schools of the day, an artificial idiom, “perpetual and incorruptible,” the international language of the Church and the university, frozen in time into a system of rules and regulations by the grammarians who had laid down the law when Latin had ceased to be the living language of Rome.
Faced with this distinction, Dante states unequivocally that the vernacular is the nobler language because it was the first one used by the human race; because the whole world uses it “though with different pronunciations and using different words” (DVE I, i, 4); and lastly because it is natural whereas the other is artificial.
On the one hand, then, he affirms that the nobler language must fulfill the requirements of naturalness, while the recognized diversity of the vernaculars confirms their conventionality (and Dante admits that the relationship between signifier and signified, a consequence of the faculty of speech, is the product of convention, in other words, ad placitum). On the other hand, he speaks of the vernacular as a language everyone shares, even though vocabulary and pronunciation may vary. Since the whole of the DVE insists on the variety of languages, how are we to reconcile the idea that languages are many with the fact that the vernacular (natural language) is common to the whole human race? The answer is that it is “natural” and common to all to learn first of all a natural language without being aware of its rules, but that this occurs because all mankind has in common a natural predisposition for language, a natural linguistic faculty, which is embodied, in Scholastic terms, in different linguistic substances and forms (see also Marigo 1938: ch. 9, n. 23; Dragonetti 1961: 32).
Dante affirms in fact (DVE I, i, 2) that the ability to acquire one’s mother tongue is natural, and this ability is common to all peoples despite the differences in vocabulary and pronunciation. He is not speaking then of a specific language, but of a general ability shared by all members of the species.
It is clear to him, then, that, while the language faculty is permanent and unchanging for all members of the species, natural languages on the other hand are capable of developing and becoming enriched over time, either independently of the wills of individual speakers or, on the contrary, as a result of their creativity—and the illustrious vernacular he is proposing to forge is meant to be a product of individual creativity. But it seems that between linguistic faculty and natural language he wishes to distinguish an intermediate moment.
In the opening chapter of the first part of the DVE, Dante, referring to his notion of the vernacular, uses terms such as vulgaris eloquentia, locutio vulgarium gentium, and vulgaris locutio, while he uses locutio secundaria for grammar. We could translate eloquentia in the generic sense either as “eloquence” or as “speech” or “manner of speaking.” But the text contains a distinction among various lexical choices that is probably not casual. In certain cases Dante speaks of locutio, in others of ydioma, of lingua, or of loquela. He uses ydioma, for example, whenever he is referring to the Hebrew language (DVE I, iv, 1; vi, 1; and vi, 7), as well as in reference to the branching off of the world’s languages, and the Romance languages in particular.
In I, vi, 6–7, in speaking of the confusio linguarum of Babel, Dante uses the term loquela. In the same context, however, he also uses ydioma, both for the languages of the confusion and the Hebrew language that remained intact. Similarly, he speaks of the loquela of the Genoese and of the Tuscans, but he also uses lingua for Hebrew and the dialects of the Italian vernacular. Writing again about the confusion of Babel. when he wants to say that, after its destruction, the builders of the Tower began to speak imperfect languages, he says that “tanto rudius nunc barbariusque locuntur,” (“the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke”) (DVE I, vii, 7, p. 14), while, a few lines down, referring to the original Hebrew language, the term used is “antiquissima locutione” (“the most ancient language”) (DVE I, vii, 8, p. 14).